Letter to a Peer Reviewer Who Stole and Published Our Manuscript as His Own | Hacker News Reader

Letter to a Peer Reviewer Who Stole and Published Our Manuscript as His Own

annals.org

176 pointssoneca104 comments

This actually happened to my advisor when I was in gradschool. He gave an assignment to review a paper that he had written several years before, but had never published. One of the students decided to search for the title, to find similar papers. Lo and behold, she found a paper with the same exact title published in some obscure journal... curious.

Turns out it was the same exact paper. Well, almost. The plagiarizers made two changes: of course they made themselves authors, and they added several citations to papers they had written (or plgarized?).

The saddest thing about all this is that each of the plagiarizers were themselves holders of doctorate degrees. These were not grad students who didn't know any better (although a grad student should know better), but full tenured professors!

I can't think of a better example of how the reward system in academia skews scientific progress.

I don't understand why you would do such a thing. When I was at university, plagiarism of any form was considered the most grievous sin possible. Ripping off someone else's research and actually publishing it under your own name would be career suicide.

It could be something to do with the culture of the specific institute where they worked (somewhere in southern Italy), rather than the culture of the whole academia in general. I remember Derek Lowe talking about this on his blog quite a bit in relation to typical excuses that plagiarists give.

This varies a lot by country, unfortunately.

It should be career suicide, but I'm assuming that because people do it there's a good chance of getting away with it. I'm just speculating though.

Did they face any consequences?

Yes and no. They were reported and basically blacklisted from the journal with a retraction. However, there are thousands of journals just as disreputable as the one they published in, and the level of egregiousness here makes me thing that plagiarism isn't such a big deal where they are from, so it's unclear that this will ruin their careers.

what is disreputable about the journal they were published in?

The fact that this got published when the work was already searchable verbatim on the internet tells me that the review process was virtually nonexistent. Searching prior work is pretty much the first thing I do as a reviewer.

Well, in this particular example at least the plagiarism apparently advanced the public good: some unpublished research got published.

Unless it was unpublished for good reasons, such as flaws in the methodology or data surfacing before it was submitted. Perhaps that's why the Prof was using it as an example for students to review? In which case, the public good would have been seriously harmed.

It was unpublished basically because it wasn't that interesting, and couldn't make its way into a top-tier journal. However, it was published as a technical report through the university, so others could find it with the right keywords.

That's kind of a naive viewpoint-if the research was bunk (flawed methodologies, bad justifications, etc.) then it should definitely go unpublished. Publishing all research doesn't fix idiocracy because idiots will latch onto any small scrap of evidence that supports their viewpoint, and if you publish garbage someone will start waving it around as if it were On the Origin of Species, claiming that their viewpoint must be valid because one study said so.

your idea has an interesting parallel in econ/finance: trading on inside information (misnomer: insider trading) has the economic effect of moving the prices of securities in the direction they're supposed to go, which is a public good. Stock markets are meant to "crowd source" a price which accurately predicts the future value, and illegal trades by insiders do that precisely, move the price of the security toward its new equilibrium.

If you hold the market portfolio (i.e. invest in a broadly diversified market index ETF, as you in most cases "should") this impacts you by helping you more accurately assess your current postion and make more knowledgeable trades like "sell some now and buy a house" or "retire". Before you object to that, remember these effects occur on margin (econ, not finance)

You have to wonder how wide spread this practice was before search engines.

It may be instructive to read the Editor in Chief's piece as well as the Retraction Watch commentary. Of interest is that the plagiarized piece fabricated wholesale a study population, making the published results incorrect and possibly dangerous.

http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-misconduct-...

http://retractionwatch.com/2016/12/12/dear-peer-reviewer-sto...

I don't understand that article :/ could it be explained in layman terms

Could you ask specific questions? The second link seems to lay out the issues quite clearly to me, so I'm not sure where to start with a better explanation.

Sounds more like the poster is seeking a summary in simplified terms.

Specific to your point: if a person truly failed to understand the entirety of an article, I'm not entirely certain asking for specific questions will help as the person may not have a reference point upon which to build with answers to specific questions. Does that make sense?

It does, but I didn't want to blindly rephrase the article in some way and then missing the point that was the issue. Thus me asking instead of ignoring it completely. I didn't phrase the question very well though.

I've spent enough time in support to realize that people's questions also convey their current thoughts and understanding even when they don't state it explicitly :).

A few years ago I got an alert from Google Scholar asking me to confirm ownership of a recently published paper. Given how common my last name is, I got a lot of false matches, and the paper wasn't mine. The title, however, was similar to my undergrad research, so I took a look. Turns out that the paper was a slightly edited plagiarism of my undergrad thesis, on which I'd been credited as second author.

I emailed the first "author", the chair of the department listed as his affiliation, and the editor of the journal. The individual responded, and after some back and forth he claimed that he'd wanted to collaborate with me and had worked on reformatting the paper, but had not meant for it to go to print. The department chair said that they hadn't seen him since he'd graduated a five years previous. The editor said they'd take a look.

Finding that one's work has been plagiarized is frustrating, but dealing with the journal was even more so. They quickly acknowledged that the paper was plagiarism (by running a tool that checks against some corpus--why don't they always do this?) and had me approve a retraction statement. However, it took me sending a DMCA takedown notice and copying the publisher's general counsel on the email to actually get it posted. It then became clear that they had no intention of taking the paper off their website. Their reasoning was that their Code of Ethics precluded them from removing a retracted paper. A couple more emails to the general counsel pointing out that their Code of Ethics did not trump copyright law and a stated intention to seek legal representation finally got things sorted. I'm still not sure whether the plagiarism or the retraction notice went to print--I've been unable to get a hard copy of the journal issue.

I also demanded that the journal send me the referee reports, which they did after some insistence (and me pointing out that I was listed as an author). They also sent the response from the submitter. One of the reviewers was very concerned as to why previously published work was being submitted. In response, the individual moved some paragraphs around and made some claims about focusing on different parts of the research.

The individual later contacted me after the retraction notice started causing some problems for him, hoping that I could somehow make it go away. He admitted that he knowingly submitted the paper. He needed a paper in my area to help him change fields, and included my name because he intended to also include my name on some of his own work to make up for plagiarizing mine. If he hadn't done that he would have gotten away with it :(

I've had R01 proposals turned down, then seen the same proposal, lightly reworded, submitted by a person who was on my study section, the next year, get funded.

that's when I knew it was time to get out of academia.

That's pretty audacious. Did you confront them?

no, b/c they were pretty senior scientists and I was just getting my career started. I think that would have been career suicide.

Happens with government proposals also. I was told about a school who had it happen to them in the 90's. A Senator was informed and instead of raising all sorts of hell, the Senator basically received assurance the the school would score well on a lot of future grant proposals.

Governments are made of fallible people after all.

This may have happened, but this is not typical behavior in science, and is hardly evidence that people should 'get out of academia'.

It's not typical, but it's not particularly atypical either. Science is one of those fields where (especially now with the publish or perish mentality) YMMV greatly. Good labs are awesome, bad labs can break you, similar to most other human endeavors. Unfortunately, I tend to be more swayed towards believing that bad labs are more common nowadays than in the past.

Seems rather simple to build checks and balances to prevent this so the question becomes is this a bug or a feature?

I saw a version of that with one of my proposals. I found out from a job ad. for the postdoc to do the work - the really unfortunate part was that they had dropped in a drag bag of concepts from a field they didn't understand, creating an impossible project, and shortened the time frame to 12 months from 3 years.

& I was enlightened.

I had a rejected journal submission show up again as a keynote conference presentation a couple of years later. To be fair, with that sort of thing we could have just had the exact same ideas and so forth, but it wasn't a common research topic, and there were suggestive dots easy enough to connect. Regardless, it raised all sorts of alarms about what might have actually happened, and I started thinking seriously about the value of non-peer-reviewed, completely open publishing just as a way of maintaining authorship credit. Even if everything were totally innocent, it was a bit unnerving about the attribution of ideas and everything.

I'm having major conflicts about academics as a career. It seems to get more and more insane every day.

So proof of original authorship is a big issue in academia? You could easily create timestamped proof of having created a particular document, so is the issue more an insitutional one? Pardon me if I make sense, I'm a complete outsider to this.

That would rely on everybody creating timestamped proof, otherwise you could claim ownership of any paper that hasn't been timestamped by timestamping it yourself.

Not all cases are clear-cut, especially where a plagiariser restructures the document, changes the wording, sources, etc..

So I don't think this is a problem that can be solved practically, or even theoretically. But there are certainly things that can be done to better counter plagiarism.

You could post a hash of the paper to a trusted host like Twitter at the point you submit it, and you could then refer to that for proof of authorship and priority at a future date.

You could, however what happens if an author does not post a hash? If I found someone else's paper without a hash, I could generate a hash of my own and claim authorship.

This idea would only work if everybody started securing some form of proof of authorship before sharing papers with anyone, which I don't quite see happening.

What about the plagiarist's other contributions? Will there be any additional investigation into whether or not those papers were his own?

I found it a bit puzzling that the plagiarist's name was not mentioned, although it is easy to find from the links provided in the article. Why the professional courtesy in light of such an egregious violation of same?

Edit to add: The second link in the comment by jonchang answers my question. Though, I don't fully agree. It ought to serve as a warning to those would-be plagiarists that if they are caught, there will be real professional consequences.

In addition, the verbosity of the retraction is a bit annoying.

> As corresponding author I ask for retraction of our article Finelli et al. (2016[1]) with the consent of all co-authors, because of unauthorized reproduction of confidential content of another manuscript. The data in the retracted article actually are from a cohort of patients from the Boston, MA enrolled in a trial registered in ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT02454127. We deeply regret these circumstances and apologize to the scientific community.

"unauthorized reproduction of confidential content of another manuscript" and "The data in the retracted article actually are from a cohort of patients from..." ought to read: "This manuscript was plagiarized, and the data falsified."

The author was interviewed[0] about it and this was his reasoning:

"I'm not looking to 'tattle' on the perpetrator — doing so starts to look like revenge rather than achieving the more important objectives, and may even draw attention away from those objectives."

[0] https://www.statnews.com/2016/12/12/plagiarist-study-science...

> I'm not looking to 'tattle' on the perpetrator — doing so starts to look like revenge

I do not fully understand this reasoning myself. Is this a common sentiment? That calling out perpetrators by name is counterproductive? Is it specific to some culture? I've never heard it expressed directly.

If you publish their name, they can't come back from it. If you don't publish their name, they can rethink their actions, not do it again and make meaningful scientific contributions in the future. Its like giving the death sentence to someone who stole a car.

Please. Someone who made this choice should be banned from legitimate scientific research for ever and ever.

Let them restart their career in advertising, sales, marketing, or politics -- fields where lying is routine and accepted.

I certainly don't condone plagiarism, but I've come to appreciate that people fail and as an outsider it is doubtful you will ever make sense of everything that is going on in their life that led to their failure. A repeat offense is one thing, but a single offense should be allowed some consideration.

Sorry, not in this field. Science is having enough of a hard time lately as it is, it doesn't need anyone who has such disrespect for honesty and truth anywhere near it.

This one needs to be categorical. In fact I would support civil or even criminal prosecution, for misuse of public funding if there is any government money behind their fraudulent research.

In my mind, this is "white collar" crime, pure and simple. The repercussions should be life-changing.

You aren't aware of the common refrain in academia, "snitches get stitches"?

What's "justice"? Outing the plagiarizers does nothing to get them to do the right thing in the future, their ability to contribute is virtually eliminated. This hurts the community if this is a one-off event but they otherwise have made or can make useful contributions. If this is habitual, then outing them improves the community (as they're a net-negative to the community).

So reasons to out: habitual behavior that's a negative to the community; to make the injured party feel better (in some fashion). We've already addressed habitual behavior, outing is appropriate as they're a net-negative. So the second needs to be address, satisfaction for the injured party.

The publication is out there, what the true author wanted, and people can base new work on that (by way of citations and reading it). So the only thing for the injured party to gain is satisfaction at knowing the offenders are hurt and that they (true author) will get credit. But this is vanity, and other than the potential for that credit to provide the true other with greater resources (due to proper recognition in the future for their, potentially, valuable work), there is no benefit to the community. And if the true author's work is of value, and their work isn't frequently plagiarized, then their personal career is going to be fine.

Exceptions, of course, are important to note. I knew someone in grad school who had a professor plagiarize their work (and not their advisor, either). This greatly hurt the grad student, as this was one of their early publications (first significant one, maybe?). It also greatly hurt the plagiarizer who lost a lot of standing within the department (I don't recall what all became of either of them, I was on my way out at the time). We can always construct ever more exceptional cases that show that extreme (by some measure) responses are justifiable in the name of justice. But moderate responses are certainly also worthy of consideration, and probably ought to be considered more often.

This is western culture.

For starters if you fuck up, you might ruin an innocent persons life, and in turn, hopefully they will sue you into the ground and ruin yours.

Did the authors listed actually submit the paper. Are all the authors complicit? Were there different levels of complicity? Was the Journal involved? Were the reviewers involved?

By just stating the facts the case is made and humanity hopefully moves forward reducing errors and less lives ruined.

Add to this, do you think a person who is at their wits end deserves to be taken down.

They might be just about to lose their house and position at there university and this was their last desperate ditched attempt.

Their harm to the original author really was minimal, if anything at all. (Plus they got an extra citation out of it)

Would you as a human not feel guilty if they killed themselves after you went to the extra effort of outing them and you realized just how bad a shape they were to do what they did?

What if they we in a manic state at the time, and the internet now turns on them and makes them and their families life a further living hell?

Western culture is mostly about about moving things forward, not revenge for revenges sake. Most decent people in the west try and practice this.

I upvoted this comment for the content but there's nothing here specific to the western culture, it's just how a decent person behaves anywhere in the world.

It is not a cultural universal, unfortunately.

There are major differences in how transgressions are dealt with between "shame cultures"[0], "guilt cultures"[1], and "fear cultures"[2]. "Fear cultures" are not especially stable over the long term, so may be thought of as a perturbation that "shame" and "guilt" cultures can go through.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shame_society

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guilt_society

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_fear

PubMed search shows 148 results for papers with an author named "Finelli C". They should all be checked to see if they were plagiarized.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=Finelli%20C%5BAuth...

While the first author took the blame, Finelli wasn't explicitly named as the reviewer. So it could be any of the coauthors.

Source: http://retractionwatch.com/2016/12/12/dear-peer-reviewer-sto... (retractionwatch.com)

Interesting. More context: http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-misconduct-...

Can anybody form an idea of the motivations behind such open misconduct? It is always very puzzling when people from the science community (which you usually don't enter without being intelligent and idealistic) get into such clearly wrong behaviour.

Another case that left me very puzzled (and terrified, regarding how long he got a away with this without someone asking questions - he basically shaped a scientific field): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diederik_Stapel

Many research papers are so obscure that approximately zero people site them. Yet if you are a tenured professor it's publish or perish and there are often significant incentives. I suspect most of them would have gotten away with it if they changed the title a bit.

There are also sometimes incentives for when your paper is cited, thus citing your own papers... even if they were stolen as well.

    > I suspect most of them
    > would have gotten away
    > with it if they changed
    > the title a bit

Cosine similarity over a corpus of published papers to find very similar ones would be an interesting exercise

It's quite a stretch but perhaps they really believed in the research and didn't want it to fade into obscurity. Or an even bigger stretch: Perhaps there's a perception that American study populations aren't sufficiently reflective of Europeans so the goal was to make sure that what they thought was very valuable data couldn't be dismissed out of hand.

I think the notion that the scientific community is mostly "intelligent and idealistic" is a stretch. The commercial pressures are as intense there (if not more?), as everywhere else in society.

I also think this has given rise to a mentality where it's socially acceptable to "get away" with as much as possible. If you can do a big tax dodge and get away with, why not? If you can secure a great schooling for your kids by paying under the table for private tutors, why not? If you can have your house cleaned cheaply by a non-registered immigrant, why not?

This mentality permeates all parts of our culture, and in academia with the "publish or perish" pressure, I could easily see why you would try to pass off someone else's work as your own.

It's sad times all around.

Here's a good explanation of the whole story:

http://annals.org/aim/article/2592772/scientific-misconduct-...

For some reason it didnt load without me going into incognito mode, probably adblock related.

I wonder if submitting a pre-print to a site such as arXiv could prevent this. At the very least, it'd serve as evidence that the article existed before being republished by the plagiarizer, making the fraud painfully obvious.

These services usually have confirmation emails. His emails have timestamps from the moment they were sent into the review process. Also, his original docs are also time stamped.

There's also the proof of existence[1]. But none of these really matter because the issue is not proving you were first, it's becoming aware of the plagiarism in the first place. The plagiarists are relying purely on security through obscurity--their cases would fall apart immediately upon discovery anyways.

[1]: https://proofofexistence.com/about

Now I wonder how many people did this and got away with it.

There's a study¹ that determined the fate of 350 manuscripts rejected by the Annals of Internal Medicine. They found that 69% of them were eventually published in another journal. 70% of those were published in more specialized journals with lower impact factor.

It appears the reviewer took a similar approach. The manuscripts were published between 121 and 1792 days after rejection, with a mean of 552 days. The letter to the plagiarist says the article was published "a few months later" so that would be approximately 90 to 120 days?

¹ http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0002-9343(00)00450-2

This is pretty common in my area (theory / algorithms), but mostly to prove that you were the first to come up with something, in case someone else beats you to the punch while your paper is under review. It also provides open access and the opportunity to go beyond the space limits of conference proceedings (practically all work is published at conferences). This means you can show proofs etc in more detail, or present more detailed experiments, etc.

I really like this way of going about things. Tons of stuff is available to anyone, conferences provide great opportunities to exchange ideas and see what others are working on, and journals don't have the enormous power they enjoy in other disciplines.

I know of a math paper that was plagiarized from the arxiv, and then posted to the arxiv itself. (The math was rewritten but identical. It was also wrong!) One of the authors is a full professor in Germany.

There were many reasons why neither I nor the authors of the original paper pursued this issue.

Since Copy and Paste is too easy and compute power is now ubiquitous, there need to be new rules that include generated data within publications: something constructed via computer from secret keys, that can be verified. (The minimum key size or other complexity measure would be required to increase over time, as always, to guard against easy cracking.)

The hard part is coming up with something that can’t be just as easily replicated. If somebody is already willing to just copy an entire paper and change only the author’s name, they could just as easily “re-publish” with their own key in a crypto system and you have the same problem of original attribution (sure it’s “signed” now, by the plagiarizer!).

The real problem in security is tracking time: how do you reliably know that event A preceded event B? In theory, you need a trusted time value, such that you can go to a server at any time and check it. For instance, a server where: given a value, it returns the time when the value was first recorded (ever-increasing). The value could be derived from content (e.g. hash of your entire paper, incorporating your own key).

Does anyone doubt this happens frequently in less egregious terms? Especially in computational fields, it's extremely easy to copy the idea of a paper with your own dataset.

At least it doesn't matter that much in my chosen field; if I get scooped, I just write up another project and keep going. If you're doing lengthy clinical trials or bench research, it's a much more difficult situation sadly.

This kind of situation would be avoided by open peer review or at least overlay journals. One more reason to go the open access route.

I believe there are times when you can also learn from others' mistakes. I remember the book The count of Monte Cristo and it's about a long and slow revenge. I hope your story will have a good ending!

This is such a disturbing thing, it almost makes one to loose all the hopes on academia.

How very Italian.

I don't have the context here to understand what's going on by I feel bad for the author that their work was plagiarized. With that said, why didn't the author have a signed legal NDA in regards to the document?

Do you imagine that someone willing to blatantly steal a research paper and publish it as his own would be deterred by an NDA?

Also an author does not have contact or control over peer reviewers and typically no way to demand an NDA.

Deterred? No. But I do think it would add valuable ammunition for legal repercussions.

It's not at all difficult to prove copyright infringement of a paper submitted for peer review. The editors will have a copy of the paper and its submission will be date stamped in the peer review submission system. That's simply not the issue here. What happened is the reviewer submitted substantially the same manuscript to another journal, hoping no one would notice. The difficulty isn't in remedying or proving copyright infringement, but noticing it!

The publisher has already sent the original author a formal receipt for the manuscript, and a keeps a dated copy of the letter to the plagiarist asking for a review.

This has been standard practice for a couple of hundred years, and is well understood legally.

Isn't stealing it like this illegal anyway, without an NDA?

Do you have sufficient proof to show in court that you developed it and wrote it prior? I view an NDA as one more layer of proof that it's yours in that battle

I do not think you know how the scientific peer review process works. The manuscript will generally get sent to the editor of the journal through their submission system, with the corresponding electronic trail. Most manuscripts are also written with coauthors who can attest to their own personal contribution.

Recommend you read this for a primer on how peer review works: http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/howscienceworks_16

While I admit I don't I can't say that trust in a system that leverages trust in peers is a valid excuse for being passive bystanders when more concrete actions should be taken to prevent further damages.

There's about a thousand different ways the authors could prove they did the work. Many are listed in the actual post. Unless you did all the work yourself, didn't apply for a grant for it, kept all your work quiet from your colleagues and institution, didn't hire anyone for the project, didn't request materials from your institution, didn't have coauthors, sent it to an editor with a bad memory, didn't use the proper submission system, didn't back the files up and lost your computer, didn't send preprints to any of your friends or colleagues, and the editor reviewed it themselves without sending it to anyone else, you aren't going to have the slightest difficulty proving it is your own work. On the flip side, the plagiarist isn't going to be able to do any of that.

Academic reviewers don't sign NDAs. We are working for free, as a community service. There's no way we'd accept legal restrictions on future speech in the process.

How is reviewing a research paper a community service? I don't mean that sarcastically but realistically medical journals specifically like in this article are commonly not free, thus I'm hard pressed to understand how this is a community service. An NDA would simply restrict you from discussing it prior to the authors publishing of it as I see it.

Peer review does not happen in a vacuum. If you do not review my manuscript, who will review your manuscript when you submit it? Scientists are generally encouraged to complete a review for every review they receive. Reviewers are generally not paid.

> medical journals specifically like in this article are commonly not free

Yes, this is one of the biggest issues in scientific publishing today. I don't believe there are any easy solutions, just trade-offs (absent governments nationalizing scientific publishers and returning control to universities)

> medical journals specifically like in this article are commonly not free

Generally speaking - peer-reviewers are not employees of, nor get compensated by, academic journals.

The journal being free or paid has no bearing on the review process.

Researchers provide peer review services to journals free of charge.

It's a community service in that you are not paid for it and don't have work contract requiring you to do it. It's something everybody does a bit.

> How is reviewing a research paper a community service? I don't mean that sarcastically but realistically medical journals specifically like in this article are commonly not free, thus I'm hard pressed to understand how this is a community service.

I can't speak to medicine, but in astronomy peer review is done for free. The reviewers receive no benefits or compensation from the journal for their time/effort. I believe it is similar across most scientific disciplines.

> The reviewers receive no benefits or compensation from the journal for their time/effort.

Some of the ACM venues give five dollar coffee mugs to reviewers if they go to the actual conference. I wonder how much of a discount that works out to per hour of review time. :)

> Some of the ACM venues give five dollar coffee mugs to reviewers if they go to the actual conference. I wonder how much of a discount that works out to per hour of review time. :)

It would vary a lot on the size/complexity of the paper, but I typically spend 1–3 days reviewing a paper.

Peer review is done for free by other academics, not by the journal publishers. The fact that the published journal is not free is unrelated to the peer review process, which is entirely academic.

> How is reviewing a research paper a community service?

Traditionally we are neither offered nor would accept payment for technical paper reviews to avoid any suggestion of bias. Since someone reviews my papers too, I get roughly the same value of work back in-kind.

We are bound by academic integrity to not discuss reviews, unpublished work, or the identity of any reviewer. This is a very strong norm.

On NDAs generally: if your entire job is based saying what you think, you avoid signing anything that restricts your ability to do that.

> Since someone reviews my papers too, I get roughly the same value of work back in-kind.

I've heard of journals that are loosely codifying this by saying they may refuse submissions from authors who serially refuse to review manuscripts. I don't know how prevalent it is overall, though.

During the scientific peer review process reviewers are generally agree to keep the process confidential and are usually bound by codes of professional ethics, e.g., http://publicationethics.org/files/Peer%20review%20guideline...

I wasn't aware of that. Thanks for sharing. I'll have to look into it more

Methods of preventing plagiarism

"Planning your paper:

    Consult with your instructor
    plan your paper
    take effective notes

Writing your paper:

    when in doubt, cite sources.
    make it clear who said what
    know how to paraphrase
    analyze and evaluate your sources"[39]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plagiarism

This is obviously an insane thing do (most fields are small enough that you will expect at least one person from the original paper to at least read the plagiarized paper), but this seems untrue:

> As you must certainly know, stealing is wrong. It is especially problematic in scientific research. The peer-review process depends on the ethical behavior of reviewers.

That people get proper credit is less important in scientific research than elsewhere, not more. It's obviously bad incentives, but with science it's most important that the information is accurate and gets out. Doesn't sound like the guy made it less accurate by republishing it with his own name on it.

I also find the "open letter" tone here a bit annoying and petulant. If this guy admitted what he did, why publish this without mentioning his name, and with just general platitudes like this? No one is on the side of someone who does this.

EDIT: Maybe I was unclear here, my last paragraph was intended to to indicate that no one would be on the side of the plagiarizers, and that I didn't like the indirect "you can figure out who we are talking about" nature of the letter. I think it would have been more effective to write this as, "Recently our work was stolen by such-and-such, we think it was terrible, etc."

The names are at the bottom, in the references.

EDIT: I think the important part of your quote is The peer-review process depends on the ethical behavior of reviewers.. For better or worse, the formal peer review is central to the current scientific process in most fields. Reviewers are incredibly strong gatekeepers, if they can't be trusted that's a big problem. So maybe sort-of thanks to those guys for pointing out yet another flaw with it?

EDIT2: and as /u/jonchang pointed out above, the plagiarizers actually made up data, which is even worse.

This seems straightforward, but,

> That people get proper credit is less important in scientific research than elsewhere, not more. It's obviously bad incentives, but with science it's most important that the information is accurate and gets out. Doesn't sound like the guy made it less accurate by republishing it with his own name on it.

If you reward the people who plagiarize over the people who actually did the work, there is no more motivation to do the work and the scientific endeavor as a whole suffers.

>If you reward the people who plagiarize over the people who actually did the work, there is no more motivation to do the work and the scientific endeavor as a whole suffers.

But why is this more important in science than in any other field? I'm just saying that they're saying it's especially important, but it's actually, at best just as important or possibly less important, because it's more important in science that accurate information get out than in other fields, whether or not it's plagiarized.

The original paper (with author names) and the plagiarized version (also with names) are linked below the article.

The name is Carmine Finelli, probably of Italian origin, like the rest of guys who signed the paper.

He is actually Italian (and living/working in Italy, just like all the co-authors).

At this institute:

http://www.stellamarismediterraneo.org/

Even without knowing Italian, from the "quality" of their website it should be clear enough the "high" level of such institution.

The IMHO preoccupying thing is that the use of "Fanelli C" is not much different from using "Smith J", as a matter of fact there is another "Fanelli C" , actually Fanelli Carlo, which is an ematologist in Bologna (and that has also published medicine research) that may be mistaken for the "corresponding author" of this plagiarized paper.

I wonder how the "co-authors" feel about getting smeared with the plagiarism brush by the guy who did it? Did they have any foreknowledge of their names being attached to the stolen article?

It would be just as wrong to attach your name to papers you did not participate in writing.

Publishing something in someones name would probably be possible, but another similarly bad offense. If they knew their name was on that paper, they either knew or had no business having their name on it.

> I also find the "open letter" tone here a bit annoying and petulant. If this guy admitted what he did, why publish this without mentioning his name, and with just general platitudes like this? No one is on the side of someone who does this.

Agreed. I find that open letters annoy me even when the author is completely in the right. I think the issue is that often the 'open letter' isn't really targeted at the ostensible addressee, but rather at the public.

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